Data protection systems and methods are known in the art. Generally, data protection systems continuously copy data from a protected storage or system to a recovery storage or system. For example, systems that replicate the content of disks to a recovery system or site, e.g., in a different geographic location are known. Data in a recovery site typically includes information related to the protected disks or storage system, e.g., history, as known in the art. Historical information enables recovering disk content at any point in time within a specified history.
Replacing a system with a replica generated by the recovery system is referred to in the art as fail-over. For example, a user can fail-over a system in an organization (including disks or other storage systems) by initiating a system at a recovery site and be provided with disks' content of the organization's system by the system at the recovery site.
A fail-over can be done for a specific point in time. For example, a system (e.g., a disk) at a recovery site can be configured to replace a protected system such that content in the system at a recovery site is the same as or similar to the content that was stored in the protected system at a specified date or time.
Typical scenarios that will result in failing-over of a protected system may, for example, occur when the protected system is inaccessible, or may include a planned migration of a protected system from a protected site to a recovery site or recovery system. For instance, suppose that the user protects a system that is, or serves as, a mail exchange server. If a hurricane hits the site that runs the protected system, the user can fail-over the protected system to a recovery site or recovery system with the latest available point in time and enable end users to use the failed-over (or recovery) system in the recovery site as their mail exchange server.
Object storage (also known as object-based storage) is known in the art. Object storage techniques or object-based storage systems or architectures are available, e.g., the online storage web service S3 offered by Amazon. Object storage techniques use a digital data storage architecture or platform that stores and manages data as objects or containers (e.g., buckets in the S3 system). Object storage is simpler than other architectures (e.g., file systems) and offers advantages such as scalability and low cost.
Current data protection systems provide limited options for verifying the consistency of the replicated data, e.g., for verifying that the replicated data at the recovery system is identical to the original data at the protected system.
A known method for verifying the consistency of the replicated data may be referred to as the ‘boot test’. The boot test for verifying the consistency of the replicated data includes generating, at the recovery site, a working machine for a specified time point, referred to as a recovered virtual machine (VM), and testing that the generated recovered VM completes a boot process successfully. The boot test verifies only that no major failures that prevent completion of the boot process have occurred and that the recovered VM does not crash. The boot test, however, does not guarantee that the data in the recovery system is identical to the source at the desired point of time. After a working machine is generated and the boot process is completed successfully, consistency of specific files may be verified by comparing specific files from the protected system with their generated replica. Another method for detecting inconsistencies is to have client applications, such as Structured Query Language (SQL), read files from the booted recovered machine, and check if it is able to parse and handle the recovered files.
The above mentioned methods are limited in their scopes, and are inefficient in that they require the recovered VM to boot. In addition, the ‘boot test’ does not enable a continuous online verification procedure, and is performed at the file system level rather than on raw data level.